Test Sites in Rotterdam, São Paulo and Istanbul

Test Site São Paulo

picture: Fabio Knoll

The temporary concentration of specific knowledge of the issues raised by a given biennale edition, the IABR feels should not just be unleashed to create an exhibition, but can also be brought to bear on existing urban challenges.

Since 2009 therefore the IABR has set up collaborative alliances to work on concrete urban challenges with local partners in Rotterdam, São Paulo and Istanbul: the three IABR Test Sites. New, open and often temporary alliances between local governments and designers, urbanists, engineers, entrepreneurs and developers are the backbone of these Test Site-collaborations that were first presented to the public n all three cities at the 5th IABR: Making City.

deploying design in a sabbatical detourThe advantage of collaboration between a city and a cultural organization like the IABR is the relatively free space that is temporarily created in which new alliances can be formed and design can take the lead. Research by design, the development and exchange of knowledge and expertise in an international setting, public presentations, reflection and debate and implementation are riveted together in this model, all with the aim of making city differently and possibly better. What the IABR has to offer a city with this solution-oriented working method is, literally, time and space: a sabbatical detour, a qualitative diversion that wants to contribute added value to the usual way of approaching an urban design challenge. Collaboration with the IABR may result in greater quality because the sabbatical detour provides conditions that allow for broader reflection, a collaborative search with an international network of experts for alternatives, for new alliances, new perspectives, and unexpected solutions. While normal procedures and business ánd politics as usual are momentarily banned, this process is still fully geared towards eventual implementation. The results are presented at the IABR after which the projects go 'back home' in order to be realized and implemented.

são paulo, istanbul and rotterdamIn collaboration with the city of São Paulo, the motor of the Brazilian economy and the biggest city in the southern hemisphere, and starting in 2009 the IABR developed approaches and concrete project plans for the favela Paraisópolis, plans that the municipality decided to implement. Consequently, in 2010, the partners decided to set up the Atelier São Paulo that was briefed to develop input for the new Urban Plan the city wanted to develop for Cabuçu de Cima, in the northeast of the megapolis, as well as propose concrete pilot projects that were to integrate the ecological and economic agenda with new social housing.

Field trip Istanbul, 2010

picture: George Brugmans

For the Municipality of Arnavutköy in Istanbul the IABR Atelier Istanbul developed a Strategic Vision and Action Plan that has since been accepted and was presented to the mayor of Istanbul on 8 December 2011. The next phase was to develop design proposals based on this plan for pilot projects to be realized by 2014. The municipality of Arnavutköy lies in the drinking water reservoir of the Istanbul metropolitan region. This area is largely agrarian. But as the city advances, tension is growing between ecological interests and urbanization. The challenge is to incorporate urban developments in the existing productive landscape. In June 2013 the IABR reached an agreement with a public-private alliance of local stakeholders including the municipality of Beykoz, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus –an area that is regularly flooded. Here too the focus is on an approach integration water management and urban design.

Test Site Rotterdam, a project that concentrates on Rotterdam Central District, is an ongoing project of ZUS with the support of the IABR that wants to be one of the forces driving the further development of the area. Just as in many other cities, literally ten thousands of square metres of office space lie empty right in the heart of the city. At the same time, there is a desperate need for smaller living and working units. The challenge is to transform the Central District in such a way that it becomes a lively part of the city again.

The collaboration with the Municipality of São Paulo started in 2008. It was the beginning of a four year long alliance between the IABR and the Secretariá Municipal de Habitação (SEHAB), the Department of Social Housing of what is the biggest metro region in the Southern hemisphere and the economic heart of one of the world's most successful 'emerging economies', Brazil.

The first collaborative project focused on Paraisópolis, one of the largest favelas in São Paulo. Its 70.000 inhabitants are literally squeezed in by upscale apartment buildings.

Paraisópolis, São Paulo

picture by Tuco Vieira

The research team, coordinated from the Netherlands and Brazil, and led by 4th IABR Curator Kees Christiaanse, Maria Teresa Diniz (SEHAB) and Rainer Hehl (ETH Zurich), worked with the inhabitants, conducted design research and developed plans during workshops in Rotterdam, São Paulo and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich – plans that were publicly discussed, presented at the Rotterdam biennale, exhibited in April and May 2010 in São Paulo and then in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, London, Milan, and Berlin, and subsequently realized. The Municipality of Sãõ Paulo started with the implementation in 2010.

The living environment of over 70,000 people is actually being improved, increasing their access opportunities to the formal economy in the process. Another outcome was that SEHAB adjusted its working methods as a result of the 'research by design' approach . Maria Teresa Diniz, Paraisópolis project manager at SEHAB, put it this way: "The collaboration with the IABR proved to be much more intensive and productive than a mere exchange of ideas. We discussed the role of architects and urban designers, how their work might contribute to a better life in the city, to an Open City, a much broader perspective, in other words. In the beginning we were not at all familiar with the IABR’s working model: a test site where the work is already in progress? How can you discuss a design that is in such an advanced stage of completion? When Paraisópolis became a laboratory for the Open City, however, it proved extremely fruitful to discuss the way we work with experts from other parts of the world. Our methods were examined, and this forced us to reconsider and adjust them."

Atelier São Paulo: the challenge in Cabuçu de Cima As the projects developed by the IABR and SEHAB under the aegis of the 4th IABR: Open City for the Paraisópolis favela progressed from drawing board to exhibition the two parties decided to prolong their collaboration. Their primary objective, in the words of Elisabete França, SEHAB’s director, was ". . . to place the emphasis on the importance of urbanization projects for the so-called informal city, whereby the latter should be seen not as an exception but as an area that should be integrated into the total urban fabric." The IABR appointed architect Fernando de Mello Franco, along with his partners at MMBB Arquitetos, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga, as local curator. De Mello’s work focuses on the relationship between the way São Paulo’s infrastructure, primarily oriented toward industrial production, has evolved over the past century and the role this has played and continues to play in the functioning of the city for its residents. At De Mello’s initiative, the area of Cabuçu de Cima, on the north side of São Paulo, was selected as the Test Site. The area is representative, in the sense that it combines many typical urban problems and challenges – like informal urban development, serious water management problems, threatened ecological systems such as the Serra da Cantareira, the largest rainforest within an urban area in the world, and a deficient mobility network – even as it is positioned at the intersection of significant future developments. The Rodoanel, the new ring road, and its strategic position near the Guarhulos international airport mean that Cabuçu will become, even more than at present, the primary distribution centre for the northeast side of São Paulo, the side that connects this economic powerhouse with two other important players, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.

How can the threats, the problems, the interests of the inhabitants and the socioeconomic opportunities be translated into one integral strategy? How can existing conditions serve as a strong basis for such a strategy? These were the challenges the Atelier faced in Cabuçu de Cima. The Atelier therefore explored, in the words of De Mello, "...ways of reconciling economic growth processes with pressure on the ecological system and the genuine desires of the population. This agenda must now be taken up by a metropolis that is in a delicate moment of transition: for São Paulo the time has come to consider new ways of making city."

Creditslocal curator: Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira, Milton Braga (MMBB), all members of the Curator Team of the 5e IABR: Making City

Test Site São Paulo was a collaborative project of IABR and SEHAB São Paulo, under the responsibility of George Brugmans and Elisabete França.

Financial support from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment made a temporary alliance between MMBB and the Dutch design office .FABRIC possible. .FABRIC developed a spatial strategy for Cabuçu de Cima to boost the area's fragile local economy - click here to see the film The City and The Forest

It must be the city’s unique position, straddled over the Bosporus and connecting continents and civilizations, histories and religions, trade and knowledge routes, opinions and cultures: whether as Byzantium, Constantinople or Istanbul, its geopolitical importance has been undisputed for two millennia. However, its fortunes have always been on the up and down, and when, in 1923, Ataturk moved the capital of the new secular Turkey to Ankara, the city seemed fated to wither away. Over the last half-century though Istanbul has shaken off most of its nostalgia and made a stunning come back. What started as a demographical explosion, largely because of Turkish migrants flocking to a city that went from half a million inhabitants around 1955 to about 14 million in 2012, consolidated into a metropolis that is now an economic powerhouse and a major political and cultural player, both in the MIddle East and in the world. Yet again, Istanbul is at the crossroads, and it is, sometimes litterally, the main battleground for the future of Turkey.

Istanbul at crossroads

picture: George Brugmans

REFUGEThe IABR’s began to be active in Istanbul in 2008 when the city became headquarters for one of the six major research projects of the 4th IABR: Open City, and part of its main exhibition Open City: Designing Coexistence.Refuge called attention to how displacement, whether because people flock to the city because of hunger, poverty or war, produces spaces that range from luxurious gated communities to overcrowded slums, and how these are all threats to urbanity and to the ideal of the Open City. After the 4th IABR, in the Spring of 2010, Refuge was exhibited in Istanbul, at DEPO

clash of agendasRefuge involved an intensive knowledge exchange process among designers, academics, and administrators from Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Istanbul, organized by the IABR through 2009 and 2010. One of the participants was the Municipality of Arnavutköy –situated in the north of the European side of the metropolis and bordering the Black Sea. This area, still very green, is covered by water reservoirs and farmland that are of great significance to the city. But its ecological functions are under constant and momentous pressure as a result of sprawling urbanization. It was immediately clear that Arnavutköy is exemplary for the tremendous challenges that Istanbul, just like many other large urban regions everywhere in the world, is now facing: how to match the political ecological, economic and demographic agendas in such a way as to create a resilient city ready for the 21st century?

Sariyer, Istanbul

picture: George Brugmans

That Arnavutköy in 2013 became the area on which a new and huge airport, a new superhighway and a new canal connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, were to be parachuted by the central authorities in Ankara, only proved the point. With Istanbul yet again at the crossroads Arnavutköy clearly is one of the main battlegrounds for these clashing agendas.

local curator In 2010 the IABR appointed Asu Aksoy, Associate Professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, to the Curator Team of the 5th IABR, and she became the local curator of the new IABR Test Site Istanbul. This decision marked IABR's intention to actively engage itself in the debate about and the making of the city of Istanbul. The first action taken on the Test Site was the set up, together with the municipality of Arnavutköy, of the Atelier Istanbul.

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Test Site Rotterdam is a project by the IABR and the architecture office ZUS addressing the Rotterdam Central District. Both the IABR and ZUS reside in the area and they feel that vitality must be restored to this urban district.

vacant buildings Just as in many other Dutch cities, countless square meters of office space lie empty in Rotterdam. But here, most of these empty buildings are right in the city centre. In the Rotterdam Central District, the relatively small area between Central Station, Weena and Pompenburg, there is around 100.000 m2 of unused space. This is the equivalent of the surface area of around 1200 homes.

Test Site Rotterdam

Vacant buildings drain the area of life – there are fewer shops, fewer people, less atmosphere, less local economy and fewer interactions, in short, all the things that make a city vibrant. At the same time, Rotterdam desperately needs more small living and working units. ZUS, the IABR, and a growing group of other stakeholders in the area, have decided to take up the challenge and to develop and promote ways to transform the central district in such a way that it becomes a lively part of the city again. Given today’s market economy, it’s safe to say things will not get better by using the same methods as before, on the contrary. What has helped cause the financial crisis cannot solve it. Experiments therefore with strategies that want to revitalize the heart of the city by using alternative forms of funding and planning, and by employing newly developed design approaches have been run at Test Site Rotterdam. The test projects include the DakAkker (a vegetable roof garden), Park Pompenburg, the Biergarten and the Luchtsingel, a crowdfunded elevated walkway that will eventually connect the Central Station to Hofbogen, running right through the heart of the Central District.

After winning a city wide referendum, the Rotterdam City Initiative, with a wide margin, the Luchtsingel really got off the ground. Construction was started in March 2012, and the Luchtsingel is planned to be ready by the spring of 2014.

DakAkker, Test Site Rotterdam

picture: Ossip van Duivenbode

Credits Local curator: ZUS – Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman (members Curator Team 5th IABR: Making City)Partners were stakeholders in the area, a.o. Rotterdam Central District Association, LSI project investment, Rotterdam City Department of Urban Development, Rotterdam Climate Initiative, Hofbogen Project Office and Rotterdams Milieucentrum, and cultural institutions such as Motel Mozaïque and Rotterdam Festivals. Delft University of Technology, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Willem de Kooning Academy and the University of Michigan), and the design office N H D M actively participated in the research and development of plans.

Test Site Rotterdam was co-funded by the Dutch Architecture Fund and the DOEN Foundation.